


lab-appropriate decor

by zach_stone



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Starts fluffy ends angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 02:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15133148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zach_stone/pseuds/zach_stone
Summary: “For god’s sake, Newton, that is wildly inappropriate,” Hermann snapped. “Those things are notcute, they are abominations. I don’t know why I’m surprised, once again you prove that you havenotact —”“Oh, give it a rest, Hermann,” Newton retorted, rolling his eyes. “It’s not an abomination, it’s two feet tall and made of plastic."Or, some backstory to the one of the kaiju figures in Hermann's lab in Uprising.





	lab-appropriate decor

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY so this is... a really random concept honestly, but i recently acquired the same knifehead figure that hermann has in pru, and after i found myself talking to it sometimes as if the spirit of newton geiszler himself had possessed me, i decided to write... whatever this is. shoutout to [mousse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/decadent_mousse/pseuds/decadent_mousse) for reading this over and deeming it worthy of posting. enjoy!

Hermann was deep in his work that morning, halfway up the ladder at his chalkboards, the irregular scratch and tap of his chalk the only sound in the lab. He was so engrossed that he didn’t even hear Newton come in — a miracle in and of itself — until he heard his lab partner say, in the cooing sort of voice one uses to talk to animals or small children, “Hey there, lil guy!”

Hermann bristled instantly. Was Newton trying to make fun of him? If so, it was a bizarre angle to take. Hermann was a good four inches taller than Newton, something he enjoyed rubbing in his face whenever possible. Hermann paused in his scrawling of formulae and opened his mouth to retort, when Newton spoke again.

“Look at your claws, you’re so cute.”

Anger quickly turned into complete and utter confusion, and Hermann turned around as much as he could while still clinging to the ladder. “Newton, what on earth —”

He cut himself off abruptly as he caught sight of what Newton was doing. He was crouched over by one of the tables on the other side of the lab, grinning at one of his tasteless kaiju figurines and holding its ghastly plastic claw between his fingers.

“What is the matter with you?” Hermann grumbled, clambering down the ladder ungracefully and scooping up his cane. Newton turned around and frowned when he saw Hermann coming over.

“What? They _are_ cute, look at the little arms on this guy!” He gestured to the kaiju figure — Hermann recognized it as Knifehead — and wiggled one of its smaller arms. Hermann shot him a withering look.

“For god’s sake, Newton, that is wildly inappropriate,” he snapped. “Those things are not _cute_ , they are abominations. I don’t know why I’m surprised, once again you prove that you have _no_ tact —”

“Oh, give it a rest, Hermann,” Newton retorted, rolling his eyes. “It’s not an abomination, it’s two feet tall and made of plastic. Isn’t that right, buddy?” he added, patting the top of the figure’s head.

One of these days, Newton was going to give him a stress ulcer, Hermann was absolutely sure of it. Honestly, he was surprised he didn’t have one already. “Unbelievable,” he muttered, stalking back over to his side of the lab.

After that, it seemed as though Newton was constantly talking at his kaiju figures. Sometimes he’d enter the lab and rub Knifehead’s terrifying head protrusion with a cheerful “Hey buddy!” Other times he’d grab one of the more poseable ones and wiggle its arms as he thought out loud to himself. Hermann assumed at first that Newton was doing it just to irritate him, until he caught him doing it when there was no one else in the lab. It had been more than a month since their first argument about it, and Hermann was on his way to the lab when he heard Newton’s voice carrying down the hall. He slowed his gait and peered around the ajar door to the lab. Newton was talking animatedly as he sat in his desk chair, swiveling from side to side.

“— if I could just get ahold of _one_ undamaged brain, I might be able to get some actual progress, but _noooo_ , apparently no one can get me so much as a goddamn brainstem before it dissolves into unusable soup.” He hooked his foot around the leg of his desk and dragged himself closer to it, propping his chin on his hand and tapping the tip of Knifehead’s… well, Hermann wouldn’t exactly call it a nose. The long, pointy bit. “I just wanna know what’s going on up there,” he said to the figure. “Too bad you can’t just tell me, huh buddy? God, I’d die to know what goes on inside your head. I mean, the real you, not _you_. You’re plastic.”

Hermann found himself suppressing a smile. God help him, but watching Newton talk to the little kaiju figure so earnestly was incredibly endearing. He watched for a moment or two longer before clearing his throat and loudly entering the lab. Newton kicked backwards away from his desk so fast that he nearly toppled his chair, and Hermann rolled his eyes.

After that, he found he didn’t mind Newton’s chattering away at the figures quite so much.

 

\--

 

“Must we keep that on our nightstand?” Hermann groused. He and Newt were lying in bed — _their_ bed, in their apartment, both of them still giddy on this first night — and Newt’s terrible Knifehead figure took up so much space on their bedside table that it couldn’t even fit Hermann’s alarm clock, let alone a lamp.

Newt, half-sprawled across Hermann’s chest, reached over and turned the figure so it was facing them. “Aw, what, you don’t like him?” he teased.

“Not particularly,” Hermann sniffed. “Don’t make it look at us, that’s just uncomfortable.”

Newt snickered, and then, leaning even further across Hermann’s torso and digging an elbow into his ribcage, he moved the kaiju’s head back and forth and said in a stupid, growly voice, “Please love me, Hermann.”

“Keep that up and I’m tossing it in the trash,” Hermann warned, shoving Newt so he was no longer jabbing him in the side.

“You better not, that thing’s a collector’s item,” Newt replied. “My figures are gonna be worth a ton of money in a few years, just you wait.”

“As if you could ever be convinced to part with them,” Hermann said. His annoyance had faded, and he lifted a hand to comb his fingers through Newt’s hair.

Newt closed his eyes and hummed contentedly. He kissed the corner of Hermann’s mouth, where it was starting to curve up into a smile. “Mm, only when they’re worth enough for me to buy you a nice ring.”

Hermann raised an eyebrow. “Is that right?” he said. Newt nodded, smiling like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and then dipped down again to kiss him properly. Hermann rested one hand against the back of Newt’s head, sighing softly when he felt Newt’s fingers ghosting along his side, smoothing the flannel material of his pajamas. Newt kissed his way along Hermann’s jaw and down his throat, pausing to nip at the skin beneath his ear and smiling against Hermann’s skin when he felt the other man’s breath hitch.

“I love you,” Newt murmured. “And I’m dead serious about that ring. You’re stuck with me, baby.”

“I should hope so,” Hermann replied, reaching down to grab Newt’s ass and smirking at the yelp he got in response. “I’ve grown rather fond of having you around.”

Newt continued to press kisses onto every inch of Hermann’s face and neck that he could reach, and Hermann nearly let himself get completely, blissfully lost in the moment, but when Newt’s hand strayed to the waistband of Hermann’s pajama pants, he grabbed Newt’s wrist to stop him.

“Newton,” he said casting his eyes sidelong at the nightstand again. “....I really _don’t_ like it looking at us.”

It took several minutes for Newt to stop laughing long enough to turn the Knifehead figure away from the bed, much to Hermann’s irritation.

 

\--

 

Newt didn’t take his kaiju figures with him when he left.

Of all things, that was what Hermann found himself fixating on. His collection had dwindled over the years, just a handful scattered about the house, perched on top of bookshelves or cluttering Newt’s desk. Knifehead remained on their nightstand, and Hermann sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it. There hadn’t even been a particularly dramatic exit — just the inevitable conclusion to what had been building for some time, though neither of them had acknowledged it until Newt was gathering his suitcase and leaving for his new life in the private sector.

Hermann sighed shakily, scrubbing at his eyes and frowning in Knifehead’s direction. He found himself compelled, suddenly, to demand of the plastic figure, _Where the hell did things go so wrong?_ But he held back, because that was ridiculous and childish, and also because it made him think of Newt as he had been before this cold distance had grown between them, and that made Hermann’s chest ache.

Most of the figures he sold after it became clear Newt wasn’t going to come back for them. He put Knifehead in the hall closet. For reasons he couldn’t quite articulate even to himself, he couldn’t find it in him to get rid of the thing entirely.

 

\--

 

It wasn’t unusual for Hermann to be the first one in the lab; he perhaps spent too much time there, working for hours after everyone else had left for the night and arriving hours before anyone else had rolled out of bed. “Married to his work,” he’d heard more than one person mutter. That was fine — nothing he hadn’t heard before. In any case, he had an excuse for arriving early today. Liwen Shao and her entourage were arriving later for the meeting with PPDC officials, to present Shao’s finalized plans for drone jaegers. Hermann paced methodically around the lab, straightening stacks of papers and shoving scattered items into drawers. It wasn’t that he was a _messy_ person these days. It was simply that ever since conversations about this meeting with Shao had reached Hermann’s ears, he’d started to hope that — well. He’d been a bit distracted.

Correspondence with Newt had been increasingly infrequent over the past several years, so Hermann didn’t even know if he’d be tagging along for this meeting. Why he was bothering to tidy up for _Newton_ of all people… “This is ridiculous,” Hermann muttered aloud to himself, closing a cabinet with more force than necessary. “As if his side of the lab wasn’t always a complete disaster, entrails all over the place…” He glanced at the small photograph pinned on the wall, he and Newt with their arms around each other, faces flushed and giddy after the closing of the Breach. Hermann sighed, pulling it off the wall and dropping it into a drawer.

He tore his gaze away and instead faced Newt’s Knifehead figure on the counter, which was staring balefully at him with its beady plastic eyes. “Oh, what are you looking at,” he said irritably. Then he huffed out a humorless laugh. “And now I’m talking to a toy. Congratulations, Gottlieb, you’ve officially gone off your rocker.”

He approached the kaiju figure, folding both hands over the head of his cane and tilting his chin up to look at the thing critically. It was a bit beaten up, years of moving from Shatterdome to Shatterdome leaving a few marks and chips in the plastic, plus a good many years shoved away in Hermann’s closet before he decided to drag it out again, along with the handful of other figures he hadn’t sold. When the higher-ups had started asking him to work with kaiju specimens, he couldn’t help but hope that Newt’s old figures would be something of an inspiring presence. Mostly they just made him a little sad.

Hermann ran a hand thoughtfully over the top of Knifehead’s head. “I’ll never understand why he took such a liking to you,” he said, not quite smiling. “But I suppose you are…” his lip curled wryly over the next word, “ _cute_.”

“Dr. Gottlieb?” A voice from the doorway made him startle, and he turned around to see one of the lab assistants standing there awkwardly. “Good morning. Were you, uh, talking to someone?”

“What? Oh, no, I was merely, ah, straightening things up. For the visit today, you know. I’m afraid it’s gotten a bit chaotic in here.”

“Right, good idea,” the assistant agreed. “Should we put these away, then? They’re not exactly lab-appropriate decor.” Here they gestured to one of the kaiju figures.

Hermann pursed his lips. He imagined the look on Newt’s face if he saw the figures here, the way his eyes would light up and he’d smile, teasing Hermann with “I knew they’d grow on you” and an obnoxiously charming wink.

“No,” he said decidedly. “No, they can stay.”

**Author's Note:**

> as always, i'm on twitter @hermanngottiieb and tumblr @joshuawashinton !! pls leave me a comment here or on one of those sites if ur so inclined, they always make my day :)


End file.
